ACT, SAT swap for Florida tests? Not a good plan, study says

Allowing some school districts to opt for the ACT or SAT in place of the standardized tests Florida requires to earn a high school diploma is “not appropriate,” a new study released this week determined.

The study was required by a sweeping education law passed by lawmakers last year, with the goal of determining whether the two national college admissions exams could be swapped for Florida’s algebra 1 test and its 10th-grade language arts test — both required for high school graduation.

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Educators, including those in Seminole County, have pushed for such a study for several years, hoping to limit the number of standardized tests students take and the burden of test administration local high schools face. They argued that the ACT or SAT are taken by many students anyway and, with a long-standing national reputation, more acceptable to a public fed up with lots of new school tests.

But the Assessments Solutions Group, in its study submitted to the Florida Department of Education on Monday, said such a plan likely would not work.

Neither of the national college admissions exams meet all of Florida’s academic standards for algebra 1 or for 10th-grade language arts, meaning schools might need to give additional exam questions if they used the ACT or the SAT, adding “cost and complexity” to testing plans, the study said.

The two national exams produce different results than the Florida Standards Assessments, so it would not be fair to allow some Florida school districts to use the ACT or the SAT while others used the FSA, but have them all judged by the school-grading system, it added.

The authors said they had “serious doubts on the interchangeability of the three tests” and they felt it was “not fair to compare schools that use the state tests in their accountability system to those that use the alternate tests.”

Finally, they said they doubted such a system would pass muster under federal law. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act allows local school districts to pick a national test in lieu of a state high school test, if they meet certain criteria.

The study, however, considered only a system under which some schools would use the ACT or SAT and others would stick with state exams. The study did not examine what would happen if Florida abandoned its high school exams completely and used either the ACT or the SAT instead.

The study, which cost $420,338, was to be delivered to the Florida Legislature as well as the State Board of Education. A spokeswoman for the education department said officials did not yet know what might happen with it after that.

The assessment group includes experts from the Wisconsin Center for Education Products & Services, the University of Minnesota’s National Center on Educational Outcomes and the University of Kansas’ Center for Assessment and Accountability Research and Design.